Gert Vlok Nel

Gert Vlok Nel (Beaufort-Wes, 1963) is a South African poet. He studied English, Afrikaans and history at Stellenbosch University and worked as a guide, a bartender and a watchman. He has published just one collection, which rightly made him famous.

"Om te lewe is onnatuurlik" (To live is unnatural) contains a number of beautiful personal, poignant poems, for which he received the Ingrid Jonker Prize. His countryman Etienne van Heerden praised Vlok Nel as ‘one of our finest talents’.

Om te lewe is onnatuurlik was followed by a CD, om beaufort wes se beautiful woorde te vergeet, an autobiographical sketch and a full-length show with poems, songs and visual material, which he has performed all over South Africa. Some people say he is a travelling bard with a guitar, comparable to Bob Dylan and the renowned South African troubadour Koos du Plessis. He himself says he admires Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen (‘Tom Waits, he messes about, just like me’).

In his début collection, Vlok Nel paints a personal portrait of his childhood in Beaufort-Wes, a rural part of South Africa with a predominantly poor-white population. His father was a railway employee.

Vlok Nel writes songs that are of a haunting, bewitching, almost hypnotic quality, in an unusual, innovative Afrikaans, comparable with, if anything, the language experiments of Antjie Krog.

The Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij included no fewer than eight of Vlok Nel’s poems in his anthology of South African poetry in Afrikaans De Afrikaanse poëzie in 1000 en enige gedichten.

Gert's re-released album entered the Dutch charts at number 59 in 2006.